Chip company ARM is prepping to make its move into the netbook market, and now it has shown off a few prototype designs that really show off the benefits of using the ARM platform: thanks to passive cooling, no fans are required, enabling ARM netbooks to be much thinner and lighter than their Intel counterparts. Thanks to ZDNet, we have a nice video overview of these ARM netbooks - as well as a few very tiny ARM desktop machines.

Both Flash 9 and Skype are available for the Nokia N810, which runs with an ARM11 core. If the market for ARM-based netbooks is large enough it's not impossible to imagine they'd be made available for them. After all, Skype would complement these kinds of devices well.

I'm really hoping ARM netbooks take off. I'd love to have something with this form factor that will run for a decent length of time.